Asking the Wrong Question on Russian TV

TV Rain, the only private television outlet in Russia whose political coverage is not guided by loyalty to the Kremlin, is in deep trouble. Last week, TV Rain conducted an online survey asking its viewers what they thought about the devastating siege of Leningrad by Nazi Germany’s forces, between 1941 and 1944: “Should the city have been surrendered so that hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved?” Within days, every major cable provider that offered TV Rain in its package had announced that it would no longer carry the channel. At a press conference yesterday, TV Rain’s top manager, Natalia Sindeeva, said that this will reduce the potential outreach of the channel by eighty per cent and that, though TV Rain is not giving up yet, this means the “de facto death” of the channel.

The memory of the Second World War (generally referred to in Russia as the Great Patriotic War) is a major ideological pillar of Putin’s Russia. Today, the official history of the war is largely about the glorification of the Soviet victory; focussing on less glorious moments is considered unpatriotic. In the late decades of the Soviet Union, the victory was also treated as sacred, with grand annual celebrations, and any facts that might belittle it were thoroughly erased from the public memory. In late nineteen-eighties, Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika shed light on dark pages of the Soviet past. But in Putin’s Russia controversial episodes—such as the division of Poland between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, in 1939; executions of top Soviet military commanders on Stalin’s orders, just prior to the German invasion; and forcing Communist regimes on the nations of Eastern Europe—are avoided in broad public discourse. A new legal initiative, put together by a group of Duma deputies, would criminalize “false accusations of the Soviet Union of committing crimes during the Second World War.”

In the course of his current term, Putin has commissioned and personally overseen an effort aimed at producing schoolbooks that present a history “without internal contradictions or dual interpretations.” He has strong personal feelings about Leningrad: he was born and raised there, and his family had suffered during the siege, which lasted for almost nine hundred days. (In 1991, the city reclaimed its original name, St. Petersburg.) Hundreds of thousands, maybe as many as million, people died, most of them of starvation and related conditions. Given the way in which Hitler’s Army treated the Soviets, it is unlikely that a surrender of Leningrad would itself have saved many lives. Over the years, however, historians have discovered evidence indicating that Stalin’s government could have done more to help the besieged Leningraders, and thereby lower the death toll. There are also shocking records of Communist bosses in the city enjoying regular meals, even delicacies, while the ration of the ordinary residents was reduced to a hundred and twenty-five grams of ersatz bread a day.

The cost in human lives was never an issue for Stalin, in peacetime or on the battlefield. Ignoring the death toll helped him to defeat Hitler’s military machine. There is an argument, too, that Stalin’s refusal to spare the lives of his own citizens allowed the leaders of the other Allied Nations to get through the war with fewer casualties.

TV Rain quickly agreed that the survey was inappropriate. The top manager apologized, and the survey was promptly removed from TV Rain’s Web site. But all hell had already broken loose.

Much like the case of Pussy Riot, the band whose “punk prayer” video was a small-time affair until the government portrayed it as an insult to religious believers, the TV Rain controversy was heavily publicized by various government officials and public figures, including Duma lawmakers and the minister of culture, who condemned it as loathsome, immoral, blasphemous. Some even accused it of justifying the Nazis’ crimes. Putin’s spokesman set the tone, saying that TV Rain “went beyond all acceptable limits.” He added, “As soon as we begin to show even the slightest tolerance to such polls, our nation, our memory, and the genetic memory of our people will begin to erode.” In St. Petersburg, lawmakers demanded that the channel be shut down altogether, and the prosecutor’s office formally announced that it would examine whether TV Rain “went beyond all acceptable limits prior to the anniversary of the final breaking of the siege.”

TV Rain was founded, in 2010, by the businessman Aleksandr Vinokurov and Natalia Sindeeva, who is also his wife. Its young, enthusiastic team is remarkable in the media environment of Putin’s Russia, where news outlets that dare pursue even a relatively independent editorial line remain at the government’s discretion. TV Rain has been an irritant to the Kremlin, as well as to those members of the élite whose questionable practices it has reported on. It is especially noteworthy that TV Rain continued to operate after Putin returned to the Kremlin for his third term, when non-government media outlets have found themselves under additional pressure.

The channel’s reportage on politically sensitive issues—the Moscow street protests in 2011 and 2012; the current mass unrest in Ukraine—has been dramatically different from the official coverage by Russia’s national television giants. It specializes in news, as well as programs built around the discussion of a theme—the economy, the environment, and culture—usually with an invited guest. Since last year, TV Rain’s audience, which skews young and liberal, has been growing: the number of cable subscribers increased two-and-a-half fold since 2012, reaching 10.2 million households. Before the Leningrad survey, TV Rain was a good, and promising, client for cable providers.

Sindeeva alleged in a statement that the question about the Leningrad siege was only a pretext. There had been earlier signs of the government’s displeasure with TV Rain, she said, citing, the station’s reportage about officials’ luxurious dachas as one example. But the survey was an excellent opportunity for the government to deal with the channel, and for the loyalists to curry favor with the Kremlin.

The first call for cutting off the TV Rain broadcast came from the president of the Russian cable-TV association, who is also a co-owner of a major cable provider. The other big-name providers quickly followed suit. A few days before the opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics, the Kremlin may not want to be seen as closing the only privately owned channel in Russia that pursues a nongovernmental editorial line. It is much more convenient to have the channel squelched by a cable operator driven by the public outrage over TV Rain’s “blasphemous” question. Some loyal TV Rain viewers protested cutting off the station, and have cancelled their subscriptions with the cable providers. But the protests of the liberal minority tend to be dismissed in Putin’s Russia.

The moral indignation of “concerned citizens’” was commonly used in the Soviet Union as a justification of the persecution and prosecution of dissidents. In the Soviet socialist state, the model concerned citizen was usually a worker. Today, it can be a commercial cable provider.